string is rarely useful as a function argument

[Timon Gehr]

On 12/31/2011 01:03 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 12/30/11 5:07 PM, Timon Gehr wrote:
>> On 12/31/2011 12:00 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> On 12/30/11 4:01 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> On 12/30/2011 11:55 AM, Timon Gehr wrote:
>>>>> Me too. I think the way we have it now is optimal.
>>>>
>>>> Consider your X macro implementation. Strip out the utf.stride code and
>>>> use plain indexing - it will not break the code in any way. The naive
>>>> implementation still works correctly with ASCII and UTF-8.
>>>>
>>>> That's not true for any other multibyte encoding, which is why UTF-8 is
>>>> inspired genius.
>>>
>>> It's true for any encoding with the prefix property, such as Huffman.
>>>
>>> Using .raw is /optimal/ because it states the assumption appropriately.
>>> The user knows '$' cannot be in the prefix of any other symbol, so she
>>> can state the byte alone is the character. If that were a non-ASCII
>>> character, the assumption wouldn't have worked.
>>>
>>> So yeah, UTF-8 is great. But it is not miraculous. We need .raw.
>>>
>>>
>>> Andrei
>>
>> auto raw(S)(S s) if(isNarrowString!S){
>> static if(is(S==string)) return cast(ubyte[])s;
>> else static if(is(S==wstring)) return cast(ushort[])s;
>> }
>
> Almost there.
>
> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/blob/master/std/string.d#L809
>
>
>
> Andrei

alias std.string.representation raw;